Ninja Blade

I’m going to be brief, since the game really doesn’t deserve much in the way of words.  It’s really, truly, stupendously dumb.  Each time I played, and just wanted that level to be over, so I could put the game down.  I ended up giving up on the second-to-last fight because I just couldn’t stand it any more.

Its greatest sins include: The lack of hard save points within levels, so you can’t break of a play-session during a level, only between, without losing significant progress.  An obsession with using low, distant camera angles during boss fights such that you have no depth perception, and so can’t tell if you’re close enough to hit the boss, or if you’re too close, or if you’re jumping off the front of the roof where the fight is taking place.  Boss fights that last way too long, and actually aren’t very well constructed, especially for a game that devotes so much time to them.  Locking you in place when you use a ranged attack – especially annoying is your fireball falls off the side of a building, so you have to wait until it impacts the distant floor of the level before you can move again.  Allowing me to sink upgrade points on a weapon that will eventually be jumped to its maximum level automatically, and then not rebating those points back to me.  An over-dependance on timed objectives and quasi-escort missions.  Accidentally catching the corner of an adjacent button once during a button-poinding QTE causing failure.

In conclusion, not a fun game.  Occasionally, its moments of ridiculousness are amusing, but even the best of those are front-end loaded.  Quit after level three if you have the misfortune to play it.

King Kong

Pretty interesting, for a movie game.  The Kong parts, which I imagine were mandatory given the license, were outright not fun.  The fixed, “cinematic” camera angles looked good, from time to time, but hurt the gameplay, making it hard to judge the distance between characters, and leading to awkward, camera-relative directional movement control switches.

On the other hand, the on-foot segments were frequently a treat.  The decision to centre gameplay around environmental systems – fire, and the food chain – was not an obvious one, and I’m interested to know how it came about.  Also, going HUD-less (at least by default) seems quite forward thinking for a 2005 game, and complements the gameplay.  (Admittedly, I pretty quickly turned on the aiming reticule – pushing in the right stick to get iron-sights felt too awkward.)  The feeling of scrambling about, fighting for my life, and just barely making it, was at times as intense as in Dead Space and Resident Evil.  It’s heightened by playing, instead of a cypher like Isaac, a character who pants when he runs, and groans when he’s hurt, which helped me identify with the character far more than just being able to see him onscreen would have.  Having first-person controls, instead of the relative stiff, third-person ones in the more traditional survival-horror games was an extra perk, and shows that you can still have tense gameplay with a comparatively agile player-agent.  One last note about the game-play – having not everything being single-mindedly bent on killing you is a nice change, and I wish more games would incorporate it.

Not everything was rosy in the first-person segments, of course.  The level design tended to be very constricted and the colour palette was just too grey and oppressive, so the jungle never evoked any feelings of wonder and majesty that were called for.  And the music, while not inherently offensive, felt particularly repetitive.  That one music cue when you’re near death, in particular, I’ll be happy to never have to hear again.  (That being said, I like the choice of the extremely vision-impairing effect that happens in this state – it goes a long way to creating the tension in gameplay that I mentioned.)

While I’m not sure how much of a direct connection there is, it certainly feels like one of the antecedents of Far Cry 2, between the fire system, and the jungle environment, and the attempts at immersion in a first-person view.  In the end, while it’s not a great game, it is another good game from Ubisoft Montreal, and one that I’m glad I played.

Bionic Commando

I’ll return to Gun at some point (really, I will), but I played all the way through the new Bionic Commando last weekend and wanted to take some time to gripe about it.

I’ll put the good upfront.  The music is excellent.  The swinging mechanic not only works, but feels pretty good, which, in 3d, feels like a minor miracle.  Some of the touches of animation are really nice, like how in combat our character automatically ducks down behind cover.  Overall, I had fun, in a mindless sort of way.

But what a dumb game it is.  This is most obvious in the storytelling and narrative.  Having characters generally take themselves so seriously when they exist within such a silly world just didn’t work.  But even putting tone aside, the game rivals Lost Planet and Gears of War for sheer disjointedness of narrative.  “Wife-arm” is the most obvious example, but so much of the story of the game is laughably under-explained.

The funny thing is, there might be an interesting story in there somewhere.  The discarded heroes of the previous war being forced into service again at a time of dire need.  It’s not an original trope, but there’s a very human sort of appeal to it.  MGS 4 certainly made it work.

As I said before, Grin gets props for making the swinging work.  However, they should have put more thought into the combat, which was rarely either fun or rewarding.  One of the great lessons of Halo and Gears of War is that every weapon in the game should be satisfying to use, and useful in its own distinct way.  If you’re going to, through ammo and carrying restriction, force the player to rely primarily on just one gun, then it’s even more imperative that it be a good one.  The pea-shooter of a pistol that I’m forced to use in Bionic Commando is weak (both in feel and effect) and the only good thing about it is the feeling you get when you know you have so much machine gun ammo that you’re not going to have to use the pistol for a little while.

I think the idea was to try to emphasize the use of the bionic arm in combat, and I think that was a mistake.  The animations for them are too long and cumbersome, so using them sucks the dynamism out of combat.  They all lock you more or less stationary until they’re done.  I would have been happy with a single, quick, powerful-feeling arm-extension punch attack that at worst only briefly halted player movement.  It could even have a knock-back on it, and pulverize enemies against a wall if you wanted to get all graphic.

Actually, the current moveset is especially bad, since it doesn’t combo very well with the swinging mechanic.  Hence, a typical combat scenario will have the player land in a group of enemies, and then stand still in a hail of gunfire, slowly grabbing each enemy in turn and either lunging into them, or throwing them, only using a swing again to escape if they notice their health getting low.  30 seconds of fun it is not.

The solution (in addition to better guns), I think is to have a more generous aiming mechanism – either a Crackdown-style lock-on, or a Gun-style auto-aim.  That way, you can play up shooting while swinging while shooting, to emphasize the unique mobility of the character.  You could even slow down the swinging a little, both to improve aiming, and the make escaping combat slightly more challenging.  A side-benefit of this is that it could actually make traversal more engaging, since a slower swing would allow for more precision, which could allow for more challenging environments.

The other big change I would make to the game would be to make it open-world, not in a GTA style, but more a Metroid style.  You could keep the ruined city – you’d now be able to get the feeling of actually exploring it, and get a lot more mileage out of the swinging mechanic in the process.  The collectibles and key-cards would make more sense now.  You could do away with the awful (and awfully implemented) radiation mechanic, or you could keep it but have upgradable radiation shielding that would allow access to new areas.  It’s not just the story that feels non-cohesive in the game, it’s the environments.  All these places could exist in a city, but there’s no feel of them all fitting together or leading into each other.  You walk out of a tunnel, or a cutscene, and you’re somewhere entirely different.  A Half-Life 2-style Citadel that was always visible wouldn’t hurt either.

Last, briefly, some other complaints.  I didn’t feel like I was getting enough feedback about how low my health-state was.  And stopping the game to have a tutorial for some of the moves available in the game, but not all of them, and then saying at the end of the tutorial that some unspecified ones of these abilities that it just trained you on aren’t actually being granted at this time is weird and off-putting.  The radar range is too large to be of use in combat, and useless for scouting ahead since it only shows enemies who are in a combat cycle.  You just end up with a red blob in the centre when there’s a fight.  And Japanese-style pattern-based boss fights just do not work with a recharging health system.

Gun, Part 1

The other day, I finished Gun, the 2005 Western game from Neversoft.  Overall, I’m feeling pretty ambivalent about the experience.  On the one hand, I have to commend them for their ambition – there’s the potential for a great game within Gun.  But on the other hand, there are so many poor design decision, and such a total lack of polish, that it’s kind of galling that they rushed the game out the door and charged full retail price for it.

First, the good.  While a bit sparsely populated, the world itself was pretty well done.  It looked fine for a game of that era, it felt about the right size, it was easy to navigate, and the areas each had a distinct feel to them.  The idea to compress the entire western territory in a single contiguous tract of land is not one I would have come up with, but I think it worked.  Both the voice acting was better than in a lot of games from that era, and, while I wish there was a bit more of it,  the music was so good that I cared enough to turn the other audio in the mix so I could hear it better.

Also, to Neversoft’s credit, the game is technically sound.  While I encountered a few AI and scripting related bugs, there were no show-stoppers and no crashes.  Checkpoints are frequent, and the game’s difficulty is actually pretty well balanced (though a bit on the easy side on the default setting) except at the end.

I don’t want to dwell too much on the obvious deficiencies in the polish of the game.  Rebel FM adequately covered the problems with the final mission.  Side-quests are inaccessible for story reasons get prematurely unlocked.  Proximity is detected by straight-line distance, so you can trigger scripted sequences from inappropriate locations (such as being in a mine below a target, or from an adjacent path behind an impassable wall).  Whether or not objectives will be marked on the main map, or just the mini-map (or occasionally not at all) is inconsistent.  Within missions, you’ll hear enemies doing call-outs (“He’s reloading”) even when they’re all dead.  And many more.

From the Rebel FM podcast with the developers, it seems clear that the amount of resources devoted to the project were rather insufficient for its scope, and so both polish and content went by the wayside, to some extent.  I actually didn’t mind so much that the game was short – I’d rather have a story that keeps moving rather than bogs down.  What hurts is that the game is short because there were cuts made in the middle of it and consequently the narrative jumps around and just barely holds together.  It’s not as bad as Gears of War, but then again, story is a far less integral part of the Gears experience, than it is of the Gun experience.

To a certain extent, all these complaints have to do with issues that arose fairly late within the development cycle, and could have been fixed with six months or a year more of development time.  What I want to talk about next time is the biggest problem I had with the game – the tonal dissonance between its story and gameplay, and the consequent lack of immersion – the causes of which go back to what I imagine were some of the early, conceptual design decisions made in the development of the game.

Dead Space, part 2

So I gave up on Dead Space, despite the save system turning out to be somewhat more sophisticated than I had initially thought.  It turns out, first of all, that after the second chapter, save points become somewhat more infrequent.  Also, the game does do a checkpoint before most major encounters.  It just does it invisibly, unlike Call of Duty or Halo.  While I’m somewhat ambivalent about this method it’s definitely better than the nothing that I had assumed was in place (as in Far Cry 2).  By choosing not to notify the player that they’ve reached the checkpoint, it gives the system the appearance, if not reality, of unreliability.  This may actually be a plus for this game in particular, since it adds to the tension.  It also avoids breaking the flow of the game, which, given the UI is clearly something the design team was very concerned about overall.  On the other hand, it’s a soft-save, and I understand that there are a few encounters where it’ll start you off at inconvenient points, neither of which seem ideal.  But it works well enough that, if I had known about it from the start, I probably wouldn’t have complained about it.

Nonetheless, I gave up on the game and sent it back.  It was just too disturbing for me (the babies, in particular) and not only was I not having much fun playing, but it was actually keeping me up at night a bit.  I made it past the mini-boss at the start of Chapter 4, and after turning the game off, thought about it, and realized I never want to go back to playing it.  But props to the art team, and actually, everyone involved in the game.  It looks and plays and sounds fantastical.  They really elevated what could have been just another corridor shooter.  It’s just not the right game for me.

Dead Space

I’ve started playing Dead Space.  I’m about 2 hours in.  It’s really not my usual genre.  I bought Resident Evil 4 for Wii and played maybe 30 minutes of it before deciding it’s not really for me.  I also tried the RE5 demo and died on the first encounter and never went back to it.  (By the way, throwing you right in the middle of a hard encounter, without giving you any training about how the game should be played – not just in terms of controls, but in encounter management – is really not the best way to showcase your game.  I can only speculate that the demo was designed to reassure series fans that yes, it’s still Resident Evil, but for a newcomer, it’s not a friendly welcome at all.)

What I’ve realized with Dead Space is that while the designers of the game want to scare me, they don’t want to frustrate me, and so I can trust that even if monsters are regularly jumping out at me from dark corners, the tools I have at my disposal will be more than adequate to deal with them.  Having this trust lets me relax (to some extent) and makes the game at least playable for me, if not exactly fun.

Having save-stations every five minutes or so certainly helps relieve some of the stress of playing.  It probably also means I won’t quit the first time I die (no promises).  On the other hand, it means that every five minutes the game is offering me an out: asking “Do you really want to keep going?” each time.  And I’m finding that quite often my answer is “No, I’ve had enough for now”, and so I end up playing in half-hour chunks, which is quite short for me.

This stands in sharp contrast with Far Cry 2, which, while it employs a similar save system, I would often play in 2 hour or longer stretches.  Partly this is because Far Cry forces you to pace yourself – the the (often lengthy) travel times between encounters are a built-in, mandatory respite from active combat – while Dead Space, even in it’s down times, when you’re looting a room, keeps showing you grisly, oppressive scenery (as opposed to the gorgeous expanses of Far Cry), and will even throw in a surprise encounter during the looting cycle on occasion.

Also, when it’s time for combat Far Cry gives you much more power to control the pacing of your experience.  Generally, you choose when and how you’re going to engage enemies, whereas Dead Space will throw them in your space when it wants, and force you to deal with them immediately and on its terms.

But even given these obvious pacing differences, I believe that much of the difference in play-session length comes from the subtle differences in the save systems.  Far Cry will offer a save-opportunity whenever an objective is complete (which is infrequent, and as often in the middle or start of a major encounter as at the end) and makes you seek out save-stations the rest of the time.  Dead Space plops save-stations in front of you between encounters, (as well as between chapters).  This means Dead Space is consistently offering you the chance to quit right when you’re most likely to take it – in the downtime between encounters when you’ve come down from your success in the most recent one, and are just starting to get concerned about the next one.  To make matters worse, a lot of these happen at down-points in the story, while you’re in transit from one objective to the next, and so there’s little feeling of urgency to press onward in the narrative.

So all in all, I suspect that if Dead Space auto-saved aggressively (perhaps as often as the start of every room with a combat encounter), and offered manual saves less frequently (perhaps only in hub-rooms, instead of in corridors between objectives) I would play it in longer stretches.  Granted, this breaks some of the survival-horror aspects.  In particular, it would (unlike most games) have to implement a good archive of auto-saves to prevent players from getting irrecoverably into an un-winnable situation.

More on Mario Galaxy

I’m now about 50 stars in. A few notes:
It turns out you can do the spin move with the nunchuk, but it doesn’t feel as responsive as with the wiimote. It’s unclear whether it’s because the nunchuk is genuinely less responsive, or because I’ve gotten used to doing it with the wiimote.

Another useful but undocumented feature: you can grab and rotate the solar-system world-select map.

The music and sound effects, while good, bury into my head to an absurd and aggravating degree.

While I’m still very much engaged in the experience and I’m still finding it fairly challenging, the game continues to feel flat, in the sense that once I’m in a level, there’s an “always on” feeling.  The other game I’ve been playing a lot of these days is Left 4 Dead, which carefully sculpts a cycle of tension and release.  With Mario, I get the impression that the bits of flying between planets is supposed to provide the release, but they’ve mucked it up by encouraging us to watch the whole screen during the fly-by’s to collect star bits and spot potential secrets.  So as a result, it’s a bit tiring having to constantly adapt to the craziness that the game is throwing at me.

Finally, the thing where a game alters your perception of reality after you come off playing it has started happening to me.   I’ll be holding a coin or some other small object, and have the feeling that if I let go of it, it would fall up or to the side. I haven’t had it this bad since Crackdown a couple years ago, where I’d looking at a series of tall buildings and find myself thinking about how to scale them.  I actually think this is related to the previous point – because the game constantly works my brain, I don’t get a sufficient chance to reset and recalibrate while I’m playing the game, and so it takes longer than usual after I’ve stepped away to leave the experience behind.

Super Mario Galaxy: Quick Thoughts

I was actually pretty skeptical coming into Mario Galaxy, despite its widespread critical praise.  I wasn’t able to get into Twilight Princess due to the painfully slow opening, and feared that I’d experience a similar event in this case.  As it turns out, I’m now 40 some-odd stars in, and I’m genuinely delighted with the game.  It’s lush and vibrant in a way that I haven’t seen on the Wii before.  The gameplay is varied and charming.  There isn’t too much annoying story tacked on.  Plus the game is challenging, without being frustrating – my progress has, to use the cliche, been slow and steady.

There are so many great little details in the design of the game.  My favourite thus far are the pull-stars that you have to click on in the mission hubs to get to the level-select screen.  At first this seemed like a pointless nuisance.  Then I realized it was probably done to avoid confusion by forcing the player to already have the cursor on screen when entering the somewhat busy, visually, next screen.  A second favourite is the flashlights that shells subtly and mysteriously develop when you carry them under water, which elegantly solves the problem of underwater aiming.

I do, of course, have a few little gripes.  I keep wanting the spin move to be on the nunchuk. The camera occasionally bugs out (most notably in a boss fight against a giant mole, where it kept trying to keep both of us onscreen at once) or, with all the turning upside-down, the connection between tilting the analog stick and moving Mario on the screen breaks down and Mario goes somewhere I didn’t intend.  Underwater levels still kind of suck (this is what caused me to quit my last 3d platformer – Banjo Kazooie) though at least they give you more camera control in them than in other levels, as well as a generous amount of air.

Lastly, sometimes the game feels undone by it’s own sheer amount of variety.  A lot of levels jump so quickly from one idea to the next that it’s a bit disorienting.  (The upside-downness doesn’t help either.)   What’s more, there are so many different modes of movement that it can get confusing to control.  The most recent example :skating.  While I kind of love how they went to the trouble of animating Mario skating backwards, a prior movement mode (swimming underwater while carrying a shell) suggests that the Z-trigger should slow him down.  How you slow down while skating remain a mystery to me.

But all in all, it’s lots of fun.  There is, at times, a “going through the motions” flavour to playing it, but then some hard boss, or other extended, challenging sequence, or even just some gorgeous vista, will come along and re-engage me.

Mass Effect (Pt 1)

I finally got around to Mass Effect.  I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.  This is a game where so much went so right that it’s to forgive a few things that went horribly wrong.

First, the good.  The elements of the conversation system – the quality of the voice acting, the fluid interjections from your companions, the ability to pick your responses before the NPC has finished talking to you so that the conversation flows (and so that you can fast forward if you want to), the consistent placement of options on the dialogue wheel – all combine to form something that’s lightweight and simple to use, and yet at the same time far more involving than conventional systems.

Another aspect that worked, that I think is underappreciated, is that, on the core plot planets, they got the balance between combat and exploration and conversation right.  Noveria and Feros (the first two major plot planets) are a little conversation-heavy up front (which is especially unfortunate if you’re coming right off of spending a bunch of time at the Citadel) but overall it felt like they found the right balance and pacing.

I was also satisfied with the overall scale and scope of the plot.  I know there were some bits of core plot that were cut, but I thought the main story arc was just right in terms of length.  I’ve played a bunch of Western-style RPGs (including all the Bioware ones) and this is one of the only ones that I’ve actually finished.  My most recent failure was The Witcher.  It’s a really solid game, but I got so bogged down in the middle that I’ll probably never go back and finish it.  In Mass Effect, on the other hand, we get a full, compact story arc told within this beautiful and deep universe.

And speaking of universe, what a wonderful job they did creating aliens who felt alien, and yet at the same time were readily relatable.  There were enough species for the game to feel diverse without there being so many that it was impossible to keep track.  Best of all, they felt like individuals, rather than falling into the Star Trek trap of each species being defined by one or two prominent character traits.

Next time: The bad of Mass Effect, and some thoughts on how to fix it.

Update

So obviously I didn’t get around to actually writing anything about Planescape, or about anything else. As it turns out, I was able to finish Planescape anyways some time last July. It was a fantastic experience. The gameplay hasn’t aged all that well, but the story and writing survive intact.

So why the update now? I’ve been playing a lot of older games, and have the urge to write about them. Once again, I don’t have much in the way of expectations for an audience, especially since the games I’m playing aren’t particularly current. Nonetheless, coming soon to this space, impressions of Grand Theft Auto 4, Final Fantasy 12, and Amped 3.